How do you know they “cherry-pick[ed] poorly educated people who come from oppressive Islamic states”? If you actually examine the survey methodology closely, it does not seem like this is the case. The Pew Survey, which is the main one I rely on, surveyed Muslims from 39 different countries, including countries such as Thailand, Russia and a variety of former Soviet Republics, Bosnia, Turkey, etc. These nations and a bunch of others in the comprehensive survey are not “oppressive Islamic states.” If you go to the main PDF that describes the survey and its methodology, which is here, what it says is that “[t]his report includes data on every nation with a Muslim population of more than 10 million except Algeria, China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.” That doesn’t sound at all like cherry-picking based on oppressed countries to me.
As far as your claim about cherry-picking “poorly educated people,” here is a relevant statement on education from the survey methodology description (from p. 149):
Education: In many countries, census statistics on education are unavailable, dated or disputed by experts. The lack of reliable national statistics limits the extent to which survey samples can be assessed for representativeness on this measure. In Albania, the Palestinian territories and Tajikistan, the surveys appear to overrepresent highly educated respondents compared with the last available national census. In each of these cases, however, official education statistics are based on, or estimated from, censuses conducted five or more years prior to the survey and thus were not used for the purposes of weighting. In Niger, the sample is disproportionately well-educated compared with the last available Demographic and Health Survey (2006), but no education census statistics are available to assess the representativeness of the sample.
Based on this statement alone, it’s clear that they weren’t cherry-picking based on poor education, but rather, were trying to be as representative as possible based on education, and in some cases, even erred on the side of higher education.
I take your point that survey results can be misleading sometimes, but the numbers in this case are overwhelming. I have no particular reason to doubt them, and even if they weren’t quite as high as the survey reported, they’d still be alarming.
I read the WaPo article you linked to, and while these are all useful things to keep in mind, none of what it says there changes the survey results or suggests they’re false or misleading in any way.
I fully recognize that Muslims are diverse in their beliefs, just as Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus are diverse in their beliefs, and it’s always a mistake to say Islam or any religion is just this one thing. I also recognize that Islamic civilization, for much of its history, was actually far more tolerant, open, progressive and advanced than Christendom. But that’s not the case today, and we have to deal with that reality. The Wahhabi branch of Islam is spreading very quickly today.
The survey results certainly don’t mean that every Muslim believes what the survey says. Of course they don’t. But the survey results are eye-opening about what common beliefs among Muslims today look like, and unfortunately, much of the identity-politics-peddling left is blind to this reality.
One thing I should make clear: my response to data like this is not to say, “Oh, so we should ban all Muslims from the U.S. and wage war against Islam.” Rather, my response is that we need to be careful when we admit Muslims to the U.S. in large numbers to make sure we avoid what happened in Rotherdam, England or in Cologne, Germany or in France (where Muslims are around 7% of the population but around 60% of the prison population). The best way to do this, in my view, is to make sure we move toward Trump’s proposed merit-based immigration policy. If we’re admitting people who have skills and education (and assessing not just Muslims but people from all over the world based on these same criteria, so there’s no discrimination involved), then we’re not going to be admitting potential extremists who have views wildly inconsistent with our own. People with skills and education and employment lined up are the ones most likely to integrate into our general population rather than live on the fringes of society and get radicalized and wreak havoc. This, in other words, would accomplish exactly what you’re implicitly suggesting: it would weed out those “poorly educated” people who are most likely to have extremist and simplistic approaches to their religion.
